“Toyota Bets Against Tesla With New Hydrogen Car,” blares the headline at fool.com. That is a bad bet. It may even prove to be a major blunder for Toyota, which actually severed its RAV4 partnership with electric vehicle (EV) company Tesla back in May (though they kept their investment in Tesla).

I say that even though I own a Prius. In fact, I say it in part because I own a Prius. Fuel cell cars running on hydrogen simply won’t be greener than the Prius running on gasoline (!) — or even as practical as a mass-market vehicle — for a long, long time, if ever. So why buy one?

Right now, not only is electricity ubiquitous (i.e. relatively near where most cars are parked), but green electricity is nearly ubiquitous — and it is far cheaper to run one’s car on it than gasoline. Hydrogen, however, is not where cars are. “Green” hydrogen is nearly nonexistent. And it would be more expensive to run one’s car on green hydrogen than gasoline.

When I helped oversee the hydrogen and fuel cell and alternative vehicle programs at the Energy Departments Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy in the 1990s, I was a big supporter of hydrogen and transportation fuel cell vehicle (FCV) programs, helping to boost the funding for those programs substantially. But the FCV research did not pan out as expected — some key technologies proved impractical and others remained stubbornly expensive.

So as I researched my 2004 book, “The Hype About Hydrogen: Fact and Fiction in the Race to Save the Climate” — named one of the best science and technology books of 2004 by Library Journal — my view on both the green-ness of hydrogen cars and their practicality changed.

As I detailed at length in 2009 when President Obama and Energy Secretary Chu wisely tried to kill the program, “Hydrogen fuel cell cars are a dead end from a technological, practical, and climate perspective.”

In this post I will focus on the climate issue. I’ll discuss the equally daunting practical issues in Part 2.

There are two huge problems with FCVs for those who worry about global warming and hence net greenhouse gas emissions:

In general, some 95% of our hydrogen is currently produced from natural gas, or, rather, from the methane (CH4) that compromises most of natural gas.

Making hydrogen from renewable resources like carbon-free electricity is expensive and an incredibly wasteful use of that valuable resource.

“Currently, the most state-of-the-art procedure is a distributed [on-site] natural gas steam reforming process,” explains Ford Motor company, which is working on its own fuel cell vehicle. “However, when FCVs are run on hydrogen reformed from natural gas using this process, they do not provide significant environmental benefits on a well-to-wheels basis (due to GHG emissions from the natural gas reformation process).”

It’s actually worse than that. Julian Cox at CleanTechnica has gone through the well-to-wheel (WTW) life-cycle GHG emissions of FCVs, EVs, and other vehicles in great detail in June post revealing that FCVs aren’t green. Cox notes that “90% of the Californian Energy Commission hydrogen infrastructure budget has been earmarked for non-sequestered fossil fuel production of Hydrogen in return for lip service of future environmental benefits that can never be forthcoming.”

The graph shows high-polluting cars on the left, and low-polluting cars on the right. And it’s plain to see that hydrogen FCV vehicles group to the left, while EVs group to the right. It’s actually worse than that because Cox does not appear to have included the impact of the recent measurements and calculations of methane leakage from methane production, which are so severe they undermine the case for replacing coal-fired power plants with natural gas fired power plants.

So Cox’s conclusions are conservative, but still sobering:

The economically inescapable reason why hydrogen is of no benefit in tackling GHG emissions is that hydrogen produced by the most efficient commercial route emits a minimum of 14.34Kg CO2e versus 11.13Kg CO2e for a U.S. gallon of gasoline (of which 13.2Kg is actual CO2 gas in the case of hydrogen). This best case is not even the typical case owing to difficulties in transporting hydrogen in bulk. Hence the on-site (distributed) production from natural gas at fueling stations that suffers lowered efficiencies of scale. The real-world data attests to the fact that when installed in a hybrid electric vehicle the real-world energy conversion efficiency is insufficient to overcome the added GHG emission intensity of hydrogen production.

Unlike the optimal economic synergy of plug-in EVs and renewables, the economics of hydrogen strongly prevents renewables from competing to power an FCV fleet either now or in the future. Natural gas is no bridge to a better future. In the case of FCVs it is an economic barrier to renewables.

Converting cheap fracked gas into hydrogen is very likely going to be substantially cheaper than practical, mass-produced carbon-free hydrogen for decades, certainly well past the point we need to start dramatically reducing transportation emissions (which is ASAP).

For EVs, on the other hand, unsubsidized renewable electricity is already directly competitive with grid electricity in many parts of the country — and poised to continue dropping in price. In places where carbon-free power is on the rise, such as California, the electricity is already far less carbon intense than the nation as a whole. That’s why EVs in a state like California is already super-green (see final bars in chart above).

But you may ask, why don’t we simply use an electrolyzer to convert renewable electricity into hydrogen and run the fuel cell car on that? I answered that question in my book and in my 2006 Scientific American article, “Hybrid Vehicles,” written with advanced-hybrid guru Andy Frank:

For policymakers concerned about global warming, plug-in hybrids hold an edge over another highly touted green vehicle technology — hydrogen fuel cells. Plug-ins would be better at utilizing zero-carbon electricity because the overall hydrogen fueling process is inherently costly and inefficient. Any effective hydrogen economy would require an infrastructure that could use zero-carbon power to electrolyze water into hydrogen, convey this highly diffuse gas long distances, and pump it at high pressure into the car -– all for the purpose of converting the hydrogen back to electricity in a fuel cell to drive electric motor.

The entire process of electrolysis, transportation, pumping and fuel-cell conversion would leave only about 20 to 25 percent of the original zero-carbon electricity to drive the motor. In a plug-in hybrid, the process of electricity transmission, charging an onboard battery and discharging the battery would leave 75 to 80 percent of the original electricity to drive the motor. Thus, a plug-in should be able to travel three to four times farther on a kilowatt-hour of renewable electricity than a hydrogen fuel-cell vehicle could.

So from a greenhouse gas perspective, there is no competition between pure electrics and hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles. EVs win hands down and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

Now it is reasonable to argue that pure electric vehicles (and to a lesser extent plug-in hybrids) have not completely crossed the threshold of becoming practical mass-market cars. But as I’ll discuss in Part 2, the view that hydrogen FCVs will overcome their many so-far-intractable obstacles to crossing that threshold while EVs won’t make steady progress on their fewer, so-far-much-more-tractable issues is implausible. Such a view should not be the basis of national climate or energy or transportation policy.

NOTE: Nothing I write here should be taken as a recommendation for or against investing in Tesla (or Toyota or any company, for that matter). There are simply too many examples of companies in the right technology space mismanaging themselves into oblivion.

Joe Romm is a Fellow at American Progress and is the editor of Climate Progress, which New York Times columnist Tom Friedman called "the indispensable blog" and Time magazine named one of the 25 "Best Blogs of 2010." In 2009, Rolling Stone put Romm #88 on its list of 100 "people who are reinventing America." Time named him a "Hero of the Environment″ and “The Web’s most influential ...

Many people have been understandably confused by our DOE's reliance on BTU's and "Primary Energy" == thermal.
http://www.energy4me.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/28228_flowcharthighres.png 2012 USA energy flowchart in QUADS which are about the same as EJ.
Beware, the non fuel electrical generation inputs into the electric block have been multiplied by the fossils fuel heat rate, asinine. So hydro is 2.67 and since it's electric you would assume it would be 2.67 of the electrical output of 12.4 EJ, or nearly 25%, but no, it's just 9% of our electric because it is assumed to have the same efficiency as fossils electric. for an assumed fossils efficiency of about 36%. They should just run the clucking lines around the input of the electric to the output without going through the generator box. incredible. In fact all the direct conversion tech should be aligned with the electrical generation box, not the "primary" energy column.
People here have claimed that we need 95 EJ of energy. FALSE.
We use 38EJ of thermal energy at present to creates just 12 EJ electricity. But remember, the foot note says it' in equivalent thermal units at 65% eff, so it's only about 7EJ. It's actually only around 4EJ. Or is it? the same DOE claims it's about 14 EJ. So did they mislead us with their chart, or are the publishing US electrical use in equivalent thermal units?
The DOE dominates the world's figures used for energy, yet they are total garbage, and political. I have not been able to find an independent check on the numbers. I doubt there is one.
In any case, There goes about 28 to 34EJ if we get 90% of our electricity directly from solar and wind. Distributed solar gains another 7% over central power as well.
Now look at oil use: 24 EJ of it are transportation. 99% of car trips are less than 70 miles, 90% less than 30 miles.
Some 80% of our total oil use can be eliminated by switching to plug in hybrids, which can be charged during peak solar hours, increasing the amount of our energy solar. If you need storage batteries to accept solar, then the cars are that storage, and they can stabilize our grid like never before possible with vehicle to grid. we actually only need about 6 EJ for transportation. There goes another 18 EJ, but wait, is it in thermal units? Who knows. If so, plug in electric cars will need less than 2 EJ. for 99% of trips.
Cement and steel are the two biggest industrial user of fossils, and there are already better processes taking over that are electric. In any case, waste bio char can supply the coke needed for the old processes.
So when you think you are saying something significant about our energy system using "primary Energy" need or use, you are confused. Understandably.

"Number 3" is the thermal options, the possibility of direct heat to hydrogen (and then ammonia, or whatever to rid the storage and safety issues). Molten salt reactors should be built just for this purpose, because well, batteries can't do it all (or can they???).

A bunch of concentrating heliostats or simply, direct electricity from wind and PV to electrode for the thermal splitting?

I know there is a loss of efficiency but I believe we do not have the option of 72 hour "renewables only" utility scale battery storage, any time soon (we can't be fossil backing forever!). If such is even remotely possible, then we must all support and promote intensive battery manufacture by massive machine automation, because that is the most efficient way. Only such machine automation could ever get a stored kWh to less than the required $50 or so.

I would think that we would have to build the MSR's to make industrial liquid fuels but if all the billions could instead guarantee super cheap batteries capable of not only powering cars, but also to store the power for all the needs of ten billion at high standards, for days on end, then we could finally ditch most all thermal sources.

In such an awesome scenario, I imagine "tanks of battery" for global shipment to areas of poor direct electrical generation capabilities!

Of course, assuming much end use efficiency, PV and wind would have to be placed on just over 1% of all land (unless there is a way to do so on the oceans). Many (supposedly) environmentally conscious people won't go for it as well as not going for advanced nuclear. So, if land issues are even worthy of a debate, then the MSR must be considered (and possibly other nuclear, if proven incapable of meltdown regardless of anti-nuclear sentiment!). Because, in order to power cars fossil free, we need almost 100% fossil free energy sources. Rooftop alone can not cut it.

Trivial amounts of additional hydro, biofuels, wave, and tidal are not enough to really add to the power necessary to make liquid fuels or charge batteries at the planetary level.

Rooftop/parking lot solar and offshore wind use zero land.
We don't need anything fancy to back them up, we just need to stop dumping, and convert our wastes to fuels and extract the raw materials. We have multiple tech for doing that. Stopping dumping saves land it doesn't use it.
We already have peaking.spinning reserve plants that are needed to load follow for baseload nuclear and coal.

Roof top is not enough land. Parking lots require structural design (for safety, thus too expensive?) and is still not enough land. Trash to waste, biofuels, wave, tidal, etc are many magnitudes too weak, when considering total planetary power requirements, especially for 10 billion people living at high standards.

I've got to harp on trash to waste... it might be good to convert the methane from trash into CO2 (that's the end process) but it is not feasable to get more energy out of a waste product. Consider that it takes a thousand units of energy to grow or make, transport and consume (and re-transport) "wastes". You will never get anywhere close to a thousand units back unless that waste is nuclear spent fuel (which is really only about 1% consumed).

Biofuels is not a sizeable option. Remember that it was dirty coal that saved what was left of the pre-industrial forests.

Rootops are enough to more than 100% of the peak daily load in most places.
The average roof has enough area for 15% solar panels to provide more than then the average household uses. Then add in commercial rooftops and parking lots.
There's plenty and it's cheap.
Parking lot covers have turned out to be very economical, and people like them because they shade their cars.
Near offshore wind has 5 times the energy potential as our total needs, and about 80% of the energy gets used within a few hundred miles of the coasts.
Solar and wind together can provide some 90% of our required energy without storage, leaving 10% for waste to fuels and energy. Holland already gets 12%.
Realize that we already spend that energy to transport wastes to the dump.
By locally converting waste to fuels and energy we eliminate the transport and save even more. Germany is already do this, and it works.
Remember that EVERYTHING we harvest we eventually dump, with most of it's inherent chemical energy intact.
Remember I said wastes, not virgin crops.

Basically, storage requirements are the inverse of capacity factor, meaning that renewable energy's 25% or so CF necessitates a 4 times overbuild, 3 of which must be stored. Then there are the lulls... Remenber that the residential section (that you mention) is but a small fraction of future planetary power needs.

No. You didn't factor in time of day and many other factors. Solar can supply some 60% of our electricity demands, because we do use most of our electricity during the sunny times of the day, and we can shift much more to that time.
Add in offshore wind, which can be very steady, and you may not need any backup.
Final, we eventual toss everything we harvest, at which point we can extract the energy and make fuels for backup generators, long haul Transport, and chemistry.
Everything Should Be Made as Simple as Possible, But Not Simpler
Albert Einstein

"And you may not need backup". True, if you're willing to do without power when the solar and wind isn't there! Sure, many families could get used to the return to a simple life of "making do", but not all of civilization. We would collapse just as every other nation in history did when they run out of resources. Consider hospitals, they need reliable power ALL the time. Business do too.

Most all the power demands of planetary civilization can not just "turn off and tune in later".

Thus, we need very cheap and efficient storage regardless of whether it is to store a million square miles of solar and millions of wind turbines for many hours on end or even just to smooth out the power from safe molten salt nuclear to provide 24/7 reliable power (so as to prevent the next dark age and prevent an overheated biosphere)!

A good story about the future (which doesn't really promote nuclear) is "earth 2100" (on youtube). We need to stop using fossil fuels (and relying on them for RE backup).

Robert, I explained that wind and solar reduce backup needs to about 10%. That 10% is easily handled by waste to fuels. Liquid fuels from waste can be easily stored in quantities to run for months, maybe years of unexpected low solar and wind. But you went right to freezing in the dark.

Find total global primary energy consumption, then divide by two, because solar and wind doesn't waste to heat loss. Then multiply by FIVE. This is the power 10 billion people at high standards will need. We will also need to account for losses at each stage of the process, such as heat to fuels, or heat to electricity (CSP and nuclear, fusion, etc) and direct electricity to inefficient storage.

Now, what makes you think that we don't need much storage? The global civilization needs power 24/7, are you suggesting that mere wastes to fuel is even anywhere plentiful to provide all the backup for the piss poor capacity factors of wind and solar?

Is this just a terminology fight we can resolve? Yes you need a form of storage: stored fuels from waste to fuels, but NOT giant multi month batteries or any new exotic technology. Stored fuels are the Storage that baseload needs as well, it's already part of the grid. We need more reserve generators to phase out the baseload inflexible power, which is the dirtiest power as well. Probably why it was ever cheaper.
The USA should be embarrassed by the terrible DOE way of calculating energy needs....in BTUs!
No, you DON'T take primary energy consumption. You just threw all the details in a big bucket and mixed it up.
You start with how our civilization uses energy. Vehicles, electricity, heating, cement making, steel, ...all the top uses of energy. You look at the first world cultures with good standards of living and relatively low energy use compared to energy hogs likes the USA. Efficiency is part of any plan.
Electricity is not the same as fuel. Don't mix them, do explicit conversions because it varies, and is a choice, an input, not a given.
You saw divide by 2. No you don't. The average US generator is 25% efficiency. So you divide by 4. Even that's wrong. What about using it in cars, the largest by far use of oil? 15%? But how many of those cars can be converted to plug in hybrids?
The whole detailed plan requires: solar, wind, mostly city level distributed waste to fuels and heat, plug in hybrids, appropriate hydro plus hydro methane, Vehicle to grid distributed stabilization and spinning reserve, and 15 minutes backup for reserve generators to power from off. Waste fuels may include wasteland crops for probably higher quality hydrocarbons/fuels.
YES, that plan can handle our energy needs, 24/7 forever, 1st world standards for the expected peak population of 9B people. No fossils, no nuclear. No running out of fuel, and wars that causes.

We still live in a world shaped by America's car culture, one that uses vast amounts of btu's or joules (or whatever). That was good, because it literally paved the way for innovation. Now, the descendents of such suggest minimizing energy requirements which is a good concept except that you people do not realize that we need even MORE energy in order to build the systems which will then allow us to use less...

Such as giant 3-d cities where all electric infrastructure includes miniature, app driven light rail throughout all levels, vastly decreasing per capita energy requirements reducing the small amount of fission product wastes into merely HALF "a small amount" of waste per person (I believe it's like the volume of a baseball... big deal!).

Will your solar and wind and silly biomass alone fight that stupid bloody isis? No, it will not because it can not power modern ships of warfare. Anything less than nuclear powered infrastructure (absent remaining fossil fuels) is an open invitation for waring factions such as isis to simply, and easily... INVADE.. We need nuclear powered "everything" in order to fight them off (by mainaining and upgrading our defence) and build the excess CO2 free dream simultaneously. We can do it, and we MUST do it, lest our ancestors fought in vain!

Waste fuels may include wasteland crops for probably higher quality hydrocarbons/fuels. YES, that plan can handle our energy needs, 24/7 forever, 1st world standards for the expected peak population of 9B people. No fossils, no nuclear.

Reality check: The "Billion-Ton Vision" paper's most optimistic projection of biomass availability in the USA was 1.3 billion dry tons per year. At an optimistic 20 GJ/ton, this yields 26 exajoules or about 25 quadrillion BTU before conversion losses, transportation overhead, etc.

US primary energy consumption is about 100 quads per year. There is no way in hell that the gaps in energy supply from sources with capacity factors as low as 15% (solar PV outside the sunny Southwest) can be filled with 25 quads of wood chips, corn cobs and straw from grain crops. And that, I remind you, is for the relatively thinly-populated USA. India, China, Europe... they don't have a chance.

You would know this if you actually dug into the data. But you would rather believe in the impossible than actually know, so you remain deliberately and somewhat aggressively ignorant.

If you think wars over fossil fuels are bad, just wait until it's a war for food and firewood where populations must be shoved off the land where it grows because there's no fuel to transport it. One of the hobbies of the pre-Columbian Native Americans was genocide, entire tribes wiped out. Your "utopia" guarantees more of the same.

The DOE concept of primary energy is pure bs. Electricity is NOT BTUs (or joules if we were civilized). Holland already gets 12% from wastes. That's all that's needed to backup solar and wind assuming plug in hybrids cars, and modest efficiency improvements like the EU has done.
http://www.ipcc-nggip.iges.or.jp/public/gp/bgp/4_1_CH4_Enteric_Fermentation.pdf estimating animal efficiency and methane emissions.
harvest 2000 woody stuff: 8 Gt C about the same as fossils fuel. 50% fed to animals.
"WASTES" understand that word?
Everything we harvest we eventually dump.
Figure it out, it's not that difficult,
It includes zero virgin crops used for fuels.

"Solar and wind together can provide some 90% of our required energy without storage..."

Please cite a source for this. The DOE NREL did detailed modeling for the US grid in their RE Futures study, and came nowhere near 90% for solar and wind. If you look at their figure 2-2, their 90% renewable case shows 40% for wind, and only 7% PV. The biggest solar contribution, about 12% was ground mounted solar thermal, which included thermal energy storage to make it dispatchable. The scenario also incuded a very large 16% contribution from dispatchable biomass burning (which is controversial at best, due to the extremely large environmental footprint, and the fact that it appears to conflict with our need for biofuel for transportation). It also assumed a doubling of hydro and large increase in geothermal.

The curtailment of solar and wind was claimed to be only 7%, but this ignores the 50% curtailment of the remaining nuclear fleet, plus they assumed a large fleet of CAES, which has very poor round-trip energy efficiency (i.e. only slightly better than curtailment).

The rosy press release didn't admit to it, but the RE Futures study basically showed that the high renewable scenarios are very expensive, any are only possible when money is no object.

DOE / NREL are political agencies directed by the current admin to project the agenda they want.
Why do you believe them? I can deconstruct them and show they lie if you really need that.
But when do you believe politician in the first place?
You think the DOE/NREL agencies will ever be allowed to say stuff that does not promote Obama's pro nuclear pro fracking agenda?
Do you understand that DOE/NREL/EIA projections are based on administration energy plans, not what we can do?
Humans impervious surfaces, concrete, buildings and such, is over 8% of the land in the first world.
rooftop and parking lots, maybe some road covering and road sides, are clearly more than enough to completely max out our energy needs in the mid day. The NREL folks of course assume you can't go below baseload coal and nuclear. Why not? NREL assumes people won't cover their available roofs with solar, but will only put in 2KW of solar. Normally DOE agencies don't even cover residential and commercial energy, ONLY utility/big donors.
Nuclear and coal already force electricity prices negative because they can't throttle, they can't load follow. They need the same peaking and reserve generators that solar and wind need.
The average house has over 1000 sq ft of roof. In Germany and other smart countries, all new houses slant the entire roof to point to the optimal angle for solar. That give them about for about 100 meters of solar panels, at 15% or a total peak watts of about 15,000 Wp. Even at 20% Capacity factor that's 3000 watts average. The Average US home uses 1.7 KW average. So clearly it's enough, if we are willing to change our roofing. But now you add in parking lots and driveways, and it's clear, there is more than enough. Remember ,my numbers are total electricity. Without storage I count on solar to provide over 100% of the daytime electrical demand. As a result, people will charge their cars and do other electricity intensive things during the sunny low electricity price times.
Just go on google earth and look at LA. it's all flat rooftops as far as the eye can see. estimate the available area from a sampling of a few places.
It's obvious.
Wind will fill in for a lot of the rest of the day. Offshore wind is relatively steady and predictable and over 5 times the total energy needs of the USA.
Or you can blindly believe the politicians and their agencies. The DOE was formed from the old Atomic Energy Commission is is still 90% nuclear related activities and personnel. See any bias there?

People who work at the "old nuclear" related industries actually went to college to learn physics and KNOW that it takes to power a world devoid of dangerous fossil fuels.

Sadly, their political counterparts would not allow the dream of melt down proof nuclear (MSR) necessary (at that time) to raise the BILLIONS out of poverty (and slow population growth) by the end of the last century.

I thought about half a million sq miles of PV should be the overbuild necessary for storage to power the world, electric cars, more efficient appliences, water, food, etc, and with conservation. I figure storage capacity as the inverse of renewable energy's capacity factor. Thus a 4x "overbuild" is necessary plus extra for whatever storage inefficiency.

I had forgot about the need to desalinate large quantities of water and possibly, sequester the excess CO2 out of the air. So, ya, we need a global fleet of MSR's as well (and be willing to deal with the nasty fission products and tritium, etc).

You're right about wind. Spacing requirements for wind power (alone) would require lfar more land but it's tower and road footprint is like nothing compaired to its turbulance.

I think I cut total primary energy consumption in half for efficiency and then multiplied by 5 for decent standards (for 10 billion people), assumed 15% PV efficiency, about a third extra for access space and did not account for line loss.

Then scale them up to provide the 45TW you just said you're using. I get 1.7 million square miles - which is about 2.5% of all land. That's not allowing for the fact that Robert's numbers come from sunny California and that to achieve this you'll suffer some lossage in storage efficiency.

How about the added factor that Hydrogen must be kept in either an expensive cryorgenic tank or high pressure tank in a car and a lot of energy is used to either liquify or compress the hydrogen. I wonder if hydrogen could be used, economically in a static application. It would be a good way to store extra energy when your solar panels are peoucing more electricity that you are using, and the hydrogen could be stored in an up side down tank floating in a right way up tank, the way producer gas was once stored. Tanks can be of any size and the hydrogen, thus produced, can also be used in a gas stove.

William, one way to bring the of cost compressing hydrogen down is to produce it at depth using electricity produced by ocean thermal energy conversion. At a depth of 1000 meters where you would produce the gas by electrolysis the pressure is 100 atmospheres and the gas would arrive at the surface at that pressure. I think I have seen on these pages somewhere that this is about 1/3 the pressure that is desired but it gets you part way at no additional cost to the overall system.

What a neat idea. I assume that this doesn't make the electrolysis process any less efficient. Perhaps one could go even deeper. This still leaves the more expensive tanks in your vehicle but each advance helps. Just a rhetorical question. In a 300Atmosphere tank (like the modern SCUBA tanks) would there be enough range to make a hydrogen car practical.

High pressure electrolysis is the electrolysis of water with a compressed hydrogen output around 120-200 Bar (1740-2900 psi). By pressurising the hydrogen in the electrolyser the need for an external hydrogen compressor is eliminated, the average energy consumption for internal compression is around 3%.

Toyota fuel-cell car in 2014 with 300 mile range and Tesla-competitive price. (The pressure for this tank is 690 atmospheres). One atmosphere equates to about 10 meters of depth in the ocean so theorectically you could get this from electrolysis in the deepest ocean trenches but this isn't likely to be practical. OTEC requires accessing water at about 4C, which is also its greatest density, to be efficient and this starts at about 1000 meters virtually universally in the ocean. One hundred atmospheres is likely the best you can expect, which isn't bad because the best OTEC sites require the production of an energy carrier to bring the power to market in any case.

The reason to store gas in an upside-down tank over water is so that the gas can be released at constant pressure (a normal compressed gas tank exhibits decreasing pressure as the gas is removed).

Storing hydrogen (or any gas) in lower pressure tanks rather than higher pressure does not reduce the cost of the tanks: consider a tank of a given size, if the amount of gas is double, the pressure will also double, which requires that the tank wall thickness also double; so for any given tank material, there is a fixed ratio between the mass of the tank and the mass of the gas it holds, regardless of pressure (about 30x for hydrogen in steel tanks, see fig 30 in this NREL report).

Operating storange tanks at reduced pressure does reduce the energy required to compress that gas. However, larger, thinner-walled tanks take up more floor space, are more expensive to transport, and are less puncture-resistant.

This TEC article reported a source that estimated a 30 hour hydrogen storage tank would cost $2000/kWatt (at utility scale). This is much cheaper than today's batteries, but the round-trip energy efficiency would be much lower too. This would be in addition to the cost of solar panels and reversible fuel cells.

Regarding the safety of home hydrogen production/storage/usage: it would be much safer to buy hydrogen (e.g. from a gas grid), already with the odorant added in. Pure hydrogen has no odor, and is an explosion waiting to happen, from the first undetected leak or burner flame-out.

For energy storage for off-grid homes, I prefer ammonia storage. Like a backyard propane tank, an ammonia tank could hold an entire winter's worth of energy. A fuel processor mounted next to the tank could crack the ammonia (NH3) into a mixture of hydrogen and nitrogen (which could power stoves, heaters, and fuel cells), with just enough ammonia left to provide an odor (and with no failure mode that produces odorless hydrogen). If you have an extra-cold winter and run out of fuel, just have your tank refilled by truck (no need for fossil fuel backup).

The invariance you mention is cute, but it applies to the difference in pressure between the tank and the ambient environment, not the absolute pressure in the tank. By that rule, the cost of tankage for a gas stored at atmospheric pressure is zero.

That's not very realistic, of course, but the relationship itself is not particularly realistic. It assumes that cost is strictly proportional to the minimum mass of tank material required, and ignores the cost of fabrication (among other things). In practice, the inverted bowl "gasometer" is a reasonably economical way to store small modest amounts of hydrogen -- assuming one has some cheap land on which to build the tank.

When I lived in Vancouver in the 50's and 60's, producer gas was stored in enormous "inverted bowls" and was piped to industry and domestic users. I rather like the idea because, as you say, it can be any size and is only limited by having a bit of land on which to put it. I like Hydrogen, especially, not only because it can be produced from excess electricity and hence power you through the cloudy periods (or windless periods) but because Hydrogen is far safer than most of the hydrocarbons. The only hydrocarbon lighter than air is methane, ethane is the same density while the rest head for ground if the tank leaks. We have been sensitized by the Hindenburg to think that H is especially dangerous. As for using it in a stove top, all the modern ones shut down if there is no heat from the burning gas.

I wonder how parctical it would be to use the hydrogen gas to run a gas boiler to heat the water tank for the home. I wonder how much gas would really be used by a stove, folks eat out so much these days.

If you want a synthetic fuel, that can serve more than private vehicles, one that doesn't release CO2 seems like a good one to me. If Toyota has a hand in building a hydrogen economy we'll have more to thank them for than making our cars greener.

Also, the EV running off average US grid power only appears ~10% better than the Toyota FCV on the attached graph and the US has a more substantial contribution from nuclear than many countries (where the EV would fair worse assumably)? What point is he trying to make? Surely he's not suggesting that we should judge an EV powered by only renewable energy vs an FCV powered by only a CO2 emitting hydrogen process? That's like saying 100% renewable energy is closer to being just around the corner than hydrogen generated thermochemicaly in nuclear power stations (for example). To my knowledge both those things are a bit of time off.....

Isn't it partly about establishing technology so that, if we buy EVs or FCVS now, we're ready when we've built enough clean energy to supply them? I'm also not convinced that FCVS are more resistent to having their costs brought down than EVs (those huge batteries look hard to cost cut to me) and that will be the deciding factor at the end of the day.

Personally I hope they both succeed. It sounds like the author doesn't, just so he can say he was right in his book.

It seems that Toyota is privvy to a new technolgy developed by Solar Hydrogen Trands - http://www.solarhydrogentrends.com/. Their system generates hydrogen from water and achieves a COP of greater than 1000. In addition to electrolysis, there are 15 other processes ocurring within their system. The unit is known as the Symphony 7A.

It can theoretically be setup in a closed loop system wherein the hydrogen gas produced can be used as a fuel source to start the process. In addition, the system is compact and can be installed at the pump, thus eliminating the need to transport hydrogen gas long distances.

Coal and natural gas fired utility power plants can be retrofitted to use hydrogen gas as a fuel source.

Hydrogen is costly, is an indirect greenhouse gas itself, is made from methane gas usually, is inefficient from electrolysis, and is extremely dangerous.
have you done the math for a hydrogen air explosion in the 11 lb tanks Toyota is talking about? Assume that about half the hydrogen is replaced with air, that is a nice explosive mixture at 10,000 psi! That's an energy of around 300 MJ! that's the equivalent of about 300 sticks of dynamite! nearly 80 lbs of TNT. tanks over 11,000 MJ are being planned for trucks.
"Daimler also makes a fuel cell city bus, the Mercedes-Benz Citaro. It has a hybrid system with fuel cell, electric motor and lithium-ion batteries. It stores 77 pounds of hydrogen in seven cylinders on the roof, which give it a range of 125 miles. "
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/will-germany-become-first-nation-with-hydrogen-economy/
http://www.hysafe.org/science/eAcademy/docs/1stesshs/presentations/Ireland_hydrogen_safety.pdf check out China Light and Power Cast Peak
Generating Station (August 28, 1992) where air got mixed with hydrogen
The blast was equivalent to 275KG of TNT, and caused extensive damage at 100 meters!
Even without air added to the tank, just defeating the pressure release valves creates a deadly bomb!
http://www.see.ed.ac.uk/feh5/pdfs/FEH_pdf_pp149.pdf
I'm pretty sure 10k psi leaks would cut through flesh like butter too. Wait till those hydrogen filling stations spring a leak on someone. It will fly around like a fire hose. Even shop air at 80psi has killed people by injecting gas into the blood stream.
http://www.nctc.gov/site/technical/bomb_threat.html
looks like the detonation velocity in air h mixes is about 2k meters per sec, but what about pressurized.
http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/37313/690060330_ftp.pdf?sequence=1 It destroyed their test setup, several times atmos.
Some say at 10k psi, the speed of sound and thus the detonation is four times atmos, or about 8,000 which put's it in the high explosives range.
http://csauth.ccny.cuny.edu/ci/cleanfuels/upload/Hydrogen-Paper.pdf
10,000 PSI hydrogen will never be safe. Even the experts have explosions and deaths.
Hydrocarbons are the perfect fuel, so far.

The above is mostly nonsense. Air-hydrogen mixtures, at the right mixing ratios, are certainly explosive. As are air-natural gas mixtures, air-gasoline vapor mixtures, air-charcoal dust mixtures, air-wheat flour mixtures, etc. It's true that mixtures of hydrogen and air will detonate over a much broader range of mixing ratios than most other gases or combustible aerosols. But a 10,000 psi tank of hydrogen becoming half-full of air??? Only if you can think of a way to "accidentally" pump air at 10,000 psi into it.

Liquid hydrogen is certainly hazardous to handle. But I've heard, anecdotally, that the biggest safety concern that NASA had with it was not gas-hydrogen explosions, but rather the nearly invisible flames that one can get with a hydrogen leak that catches fire. An unsuspecting worker could blunder into the flame from leaking LH2 plumbing without knowing it was there. Workers were instructed to carry strips of material hanging from sticks held out in front of them, when the ventured into areas where a hydrogen leak might occur.

I've seen videos of the safety testing done on 10,000 PSI hydrogen tanks. It includes lighting a bonfire around a full tank, and finding the tank still intact when the fire has burned out. Also firing an armour-piercing round into a full tank. The round penetrates and the tank sprouts a long jet of escaping hydrogen, but doesn't explode. The jet of gas is visible because it's cold enough to instantly freeze the water vapor in the air around it.

No, the problem isn't safety. It's cost. Even with the expected cost reductions possible with mass production, each of those super-tanks would cost more than an average car.

One could argue that hydrogen is safer than most of the hydrocarbon fuels, liquid or gaseous. If a rupture occurs in a hydrogen tank, the hydrogen is lighter than air and quickly rises up away from any potential source of ignition. Methane is also lighter than air, ethane the same density and all other hydrocarbon vapours or gaseous hydrocarbon fuels are heavier than air. They flow along the ground looking for a spark.

The infrastructure costs will be prohibitively expensive for hydrogen and these costs will be passed onto the end user. Also, the price/kg will be set high due to a small cartel of producers making the stuff even if demand and volume production was high enough to offset economies of scale.

BEV range is only going to improve especially now that PJP are marketing their dual carbon battery that can more than double the range of existing Li-on batteries with no heat build up and x3000 recharge capacity. Other battery chemistries will doubtless follow over ther next few years and the call for hydrogen fuel cell vehicles will become an irrelavance.

The only thing now that is likely to stop BEV progression is the vested interests of the petro-chemical (that includes hydrogen) and automotive industry that is wedded to the status quo.

Anyone with sufficient solar panels on their roof can charge their BEV (directly or indirectly) from microgeneration which makes the running of the vehicle virtually carbon neutral. You could never do that with hydrogen!

From Car & Driver article.Google: Will Hydrogen Be Cheaper Than Gasoline? Who Knows?

The pump we used quoted the price of hydrogen at $5 per kilogram. The actual cost for pump hydrogen in the future is difficult to estimate with any accuracy, though, since the volume and infrastructure aren’t yet mature. Balch cites studies that foresee the price of hydrogen leveling off between $2 and $4 per kilogram, and he points out that a kilogram of H2 typically provides more range than a gallon of gas. Once the price of hydrogen does come down, it should carry a cost per mile that’s similar to or better than that of gasoline. Better yet, once established, the price is not expected to fluctuate with the same volatility as that of gasoline.

So although the process of pumping hydrogen into a fuel-cell vehicle is pretty simple (and getting simpler), the process of pumping hydrogen into our infrastructure could be one of the great challenges of our generation. At least we can look forward to keeping our hands clean.

The ix35 Fuel Cell is equipped with a 100 kW electric motor, allowing it to reach a maximum speed of 160 km/h (99 mph). Two hydrogen storage tanks, with a total capacity of 5.64 kg, enable the vehicle to travel a total of 594 km (369 miles) on a single charge, and it can reliably start in temperatures as low as -20 degrees Celsius.

Hyundai ix35 "Tuscon" Fuel Cell Vehicle

The ix35 Fuel Cell is equipped with a 100 kW electric motor, allowing it to reach a maximum speed of 160 km/h (99 mph). Two hydrogen storage tanks, with a total capacity of 5.64 kg, enable the vehicle to travel a total of 594 km (369 miles) on a single charge, and it can reliably start in temperatures as low as -20 degrees Celsius.

5.64 x $5 = $28.20 to travel 369 miles

5.64 x $4 = $22.56 to travel 369 miles

5.64 x $3 = $16.92 to travel 369 miles

POLLUTION FREE WITH PURE WATER COMING OUT TAILPIPE! HEALTH COST SAVINGS AND ADDED DISPOSABLE INCOME FOR ALL? NOT BILLIONS BUT IN THE $TRILLIONS!

At present, it costs about a third as much to travel a kilometre in a pure electric car as it does in a petrol car. If that ration remains about the same, a fuel, such as Hydrogen, even if it only costs the same as petol per km traveled will have great difficulty competing. Did you hear that Telsa has opened up her patents to whoever wants to use them. That could be a game changer.

Im too afraid to get into a hydrogen fueled vehicle after seeing the photos and how dangerous it is.

The patent was issued July 15 2014 for GreenNH3 , (safe hydrogen) so the inventor has fullfilled his social contract,, but investors and politicians are hiding and not filling their social contracts.

So now you and I can travel zero emissions for $2 a gallon if someone would get off their duff.

Only trouble is Big Oil has so much power investors like Warren Buffet and Bill Gates wont fill their social contracts and get this technology in place so you and I can use it.

If GreenNH3 machines become as plentiful as refrigerators it could solve a lot of the worlds problems, including, climate change, middle east strife, poorer 3rd world poverty, maybe cause an economic uptick here

Here's an interesting NRE report on their fuel cell vehicle demos, from 2012. Not very impressive (although as you say, this is somewhat dated); the fuel efficiencies demonstrated were hardly better that would you would get from ammonia-electric hybrids (36-52 miles per gallon-of-gasoline-equiv). Keep in mind that any fuel economy number that come out of Japan will look much worse when the same vehicles come to the US, due to higher driving speeds.

Another problem highlighted in the report is the stubornly low density of gaseous H2. Going from 350 bar storage to 700 bars (5000->10,000 psi) only boosted tank capacity by around 20%, partly due to the tank walls getting thicker. Those tanks by the way, weighs 30x more than the H2 they contain.

They reported that energy equivalent to 11.3% of the hydrogen was used to compress the hydrogen. This is almost as much energy as would be required to convert the H2 to ammonia.

Then there is still the problem of expensive, platinum-filled fuel cells.

1), What's the efficiency to convert sunlight, wind into hydrogen, methanol, dimethal ether and of course, ammonia? 2), how much energy to either pressurize it or liquify it (if at all)? 3), how efficient in the vehicle's fuelcell to electric motor? 4), will (any) new infrastructure issues become a deciding factor? And 5), safety.

We all need to learn which is the best fit for direct electrical sources and what's best for thermal sources, such as molten salt nuclear (if proven to not cause societal breakdown due to the fear factor). From there, we can determine the least expensive, most abundant non carbon source of power for all sectors.

Also, there is the fact that simply direct electricity to battery may be the overall winner for the light vehicle sector because electricity is transported over an already established infrastructure at the speed of light, can be stored in batteries at rather high efficiencies, be used to propell the car at high efficiencies and be safe.

We need to vastly improve wind, solar, the molten salt reactor, whatever best liquid fuel (or hydrogen if transport is cheaper than whatever additional costs for liquid fuels) and of course, battery manufacture.

Here is a "Quad Generation" Fuel Cell System that may be of some help to those who think C02 is being emitted or will be emitted. FYI - These Fuel Cell Systems (Tri-Gen, Quad-Gen) are CLOSED systems that enable the C02 to be captured ect....

Publication Date: Monday, March 24, 2014

Publication: The Wall Street JournalVillage Farms International, Inc., In Collaboration with Quadrogen Power Systems, Inc. and Fuel Cell Energy, Inc.Announces the First Ever $7.5 Million Quad-Genergation Energy Project.http://www.villagefarms.com/AboutVillageFarms/NewsAndPress/Articles/fuelcellproject.aspx"Tri-Gen" Fuel Cell System... Up and running now at Municipal Wastewater Treatment facilities in CA.https://www1.eere.energy.gov/hydrogenandfuelcells/pdfs/tri-generation_fountainvalley.pdfAll from a human waste... Creating 3 (Three) value streams of Hydrogen, Electricity and Heat. Impressive to say the least.

Batteries still have the promise of machine automation (or other automated process like 3-d printing?). They say there are only enough batteries on the planet to store about ten minutes of global demand, however, this must be vastly improved upon if we wish to gain the highest efficiencies possible from electricity sources and gain the much better efficiency over any liquid fuel to the vehicle.

Most of the comments below defending FCVs ignore one or both of the key points that Joe makes:

(1) If you're talking about the most economical and widely implemented production method for hydrogen (i.e., from reforming of natural gas), then the carbon footprint for the FCV is substantially worse than if the gas were used directly in an IC engine. You've gone to a lot of trouble and expense for a worse result.

(2) If, instead, you're talking about the more expensive route of producing hydrogen by electrolysis of water using zero-carbon electricity, then you could get two to three times better mileage per kWh by using that electricity to charge batteries rather than make hydrogen.

The main potential advantages that FCVs can deliver over BEVs are driving range and fast refueling. But those are non-issues for the commuting and shopping trips that comprise the overwhelming bulk of miles driven. Going on a road trip? Then rent a gasoline vehicle for that purpose. With the coming era of autonomous vehicles, the rental agency will deliver the vehicle to your driveway, and drive it back to their lot after you've returned home.

Where do you get insurance for hydrogen?,, Call up your insurer and ask for a quote. Batteries will move cars around and work well in warmer climates.. What about winter? What about big freight trucks and planes. For the mainstream and air travel, only working robust one we see is GreenNH3. Zero emissions and $2 a gallon.The patent was issued July 15 2014. The inventor fullfilled his social contract, but government and investors are hiding.

actually using thermal based sources such as geothermal energy the conversion efficiencies for elecrolytically produced hydrogen can reach 80% http://digitalcommon

s.usu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1038&context=etd

SMR produced hydrogen can also approach this figure, whereas electricity derived from thermal plants (which are most the most common form of generation for the most common charging time of EVs) is much lower at 30-60% efficiency depending on plant type and load profile being responeded to.

Another important note is that the 2015 model being released by Toyota has a marked improvement in fuel economy at 80 miles per kg H2 according to testing by the Japanese govt. This is close over a 40% improvement over commonly cited figures for FCEV fuel economy.

So overall I find most of the commentary in the article and in the comments section to be out of date in regards to efficiencies of conversion methods and fuel cells themselves, while also not acknowledging the rates of improvement in cost and performance post 2000 in Fuel Cells compared to Lithium based battery technologies.

A parenthetical followup: there is one approach to FCVs that would make technical sense to me. But it's not one that I see anyone pursuing. That would be using a high-temperature fuel cell that can run directly on methane or methanol, combined with a heat engine running on the high temperature waste heat of the fuel cell.

The very high efficiency of that approach would give it a low carbon footprint. It would be necessary to put the fuel cell inside a super-insulated container, maintaining itself in a hot standby mode on a trickle of fuel unless the owner were willing to wait the 15 minutes or so needed for a cold startup. Kind of like an old Windows machine.

Linde starts production line for fuel cell car "filling stations"http://in.reuters.com/article/2014/07/14/linde-autos-hydrogen-idINL6N0PP4EK20140714(Reuters) - German industrial gases maker Linde opened what it said was the world's first production line for hydrogen fuelling stations on Monday, in a bid to boost support networks for eco-friendly cars.Fuel-cell cars, which compete with electric and hybrid vehicles in a race to capture environmentally conscious drivers, use a stack of cells that combine hydrogen with oxygen in the air to generate electricity.Their only emissions are water vapour and heat, but the technology has been held back by high costs and lack of infrastructure. Fuel-cell cars will go on sale starting at $70,000, and filling stations cost over $1 million to build.On the back of commercial launch announcements by Toyota and Hyundai and demand in Japan, Linde started up a production facility with an initial annual capacity of 50 stations a year. Until now, it has built them one by one.The company announced an order for 28 stations from Japanese gas trading company Iwatani, which put the first of its Linde stations into operation near Osaka on Monday, the first commercial hydrogen fuelling station in Japan. "It's a chicken-and-egg situation," Linde executive board member Aldo Belloni told Reuters on the sidelines of the opening ceremony in Vienna.Belloni declined to say how much Linde had invested since starting its fuel-cell research and development in 1988, centred in Vienna, but said it was "very much".Fuel-cell cars can run five times longer than electric cars and fill a tank 10 times as fast.

These are billion dollar companies Air Products, GE, BMW, Honda, Toyota, Walmat, Costco, Mercedes and then you have the govts in Europe, Japan all backing Fuel Cell Technology...